Monday, December 29, 2014

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) has announced their partnership with Guidekick,
a start up company that creates pocket sized, mobile app guides. Their
first San Francisco based project will be to create a guide to Golden Gate Park, which will include nearly 150 points of interest, The de Young
Museum is included as well as the California Academy of Sciences, the
Japanese Tea Garden and the San Francisco Botanical Garden.

Cliff House

Sutro Baths

The 3-D images look like what you would expect - very sterile but the wealth of history and other info makes this worth a $1.99 download from i Tunes. As it is, people are fixated on their cell phones so they might as well get some real info while they are obsessing at the tiny screen.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

At the Contemporary Jewish Museum: Grammy nominated duo—The Pop-Ups perform their music using cardboard props, hand-painted sets, and a colorful cast of original puppets; crafting a world of magic that engages, educates, and delights all ages. Performances at 1 and 2:30pm with a special “meet the puppets” workshop at 11:30am.*Tickets for The Pop-Ups performances available on a first-come, first-serve basis on the day of the event and are extremely limited.

Monday, December 22, 2014

The gravel-voiced, charismatic singer has died of lung cancer. He was the idol of many in my generation and at 70, seemed too young to die. His cover of the Beatles' song "A Little Help from My Friends" propelled him to stardom, reaching number one in 1968. He went on to create the standards of blue-eyed soul. His early career was a wild one, with drink and drugs nearly doing him him.

The musician went through personal struggles with drugs and alcohol.

In 2012, he discussed those struggles with NPR's Rachel Martin:

"I was about 26 years old, and I kind of felt indestructible," Cocker says, recalling the 1970 tour that spawned his famous live album Mad Dogs & Englishmen. "By the early '70s, the drugs and the booze took their toll. ... It was a long road back. A lot of times when you're young and carefree, you don't realize, when you tip over the edge, how difficult it is to climb back in."

Sunday, December 21, 2014

The Briton Ensemble Gloucestershire Wassail Winter 2012

Wassail (Old Englishwæs hæl, literally 'be you healthy') refers both to the salute 'Waes Hail' and to the drink of wassail, a hot mulled cider traditionally drunk as an integral part of wassailing, an ancient southern English drinking ritual intended to ensure a good cider apple harvest the following year.

Wassail! wassail! all over the town,Our toast it is white and our ale it is brown;Our bowl it is made of the white maple tree;With the wassailing bowl, we'll drink to thee.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

This is a week for great artists. First Klee, now de Hooch whose work so impressed me in the traveling show from the Hague.This was one of the best shows that I have seen in San Francisco and not only because they were exhibiting “The Girl with the Pearl Earring.” 17th century art is a genre that I can view over and over - so many masterpieces that pull you in by their skill, their love of ordinary life and their understated mystique.

December 20, 1629. Pieter de Hooch, also spelled "Hoogh" or "Hooghe" (baptized December 20, 1629 - 1684) was a genre painter during the Dutch Golden Age. He was a contemporary of Dutch Master Jan Vermeer, with whom his work shared themes and style. Most scholars believe that de Hooch's work after around 1670 became more stylized and deteriorated in quality. It may be that his distress (at age 38, with a young family) at the death of his wife (in 1667) affected his work.

In any case, his health was now deteriorating, and he died in 1684 in an Amsterdam insane asylum, though the direct cause of his admission there is unknown. In this image: A Couple Walking in the Citizens' Hall of Amsterdam Town Hall (aka Départ pour la promenade) - circa 1663-65 oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg.

De Hooch is noted for his interior scenes and use of light and best known for his early works, which he painted in Delft. His favorite subjects were middle-class families in ordinary interiors and sunny courtyards, performing their humble daily duties in a calm atmosphere disrupted only by the radiant entry of natural light penetrating a door or window. Critics believe that it was De Hooch who influenced Vermeer rather than the contrary. De Hooch repeated his basic compositions many times, so that some consider his later works less interesting. Alejandro Vergara, Vermeer and the Dutch Interior. Madrid, 2003, p. 211

Soldiers playing cards.

Woman with baby on her lap, 1658

"De Hooch's paintings have complex structures, which create the illusion of real perspective. Rectangular architectural frames and blocks give the impression of distance, and lead the viewer's eye to the main focus of the painting...receding floor tiles also help to create this impression of perspective.

"As well as his mastery of perspective, De Hooch was skilled in the portrayal of natural light falling on a scene. His light is warm - more intense than Vermeer's - and his color range is richer, with fewer cool tones."

Thursday, December 18, 2014

From the Met's website: Klee was born on December 18, 1879, in Münchenbuchsee, near Bern,
Switzerland, the second child of Hans Klee, a German music teacher, and a
Swiss mother. His training as a painter began in 1898 when he studied
drawing and painting in Munich for three years.

Red and White Domes, 1914

By 1911, he had returned
to Munich, where he became involved with the German Expressionist
group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), founded by Wassily Kandinsky
and Franz Marc. Klee and Kandinsky became lifelong friends, and
the support of the older painter provided much-needed encouragement.

A Young Lady's Adventure, 1921

Until then, Klee had worked in relative isolation, experimenting with
various styles and media, such as making caricatures and Symbolist
drawings, and later producing small works on paper mainly in black and
white. His work was also influenced by the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and the abstract translucent color planes of Robert Delaunay.

Hammamet with Its Mosque, 1914

Klee's artistic training, which began in 1898, can be said to have lasted
until 1914, when he visited Tunisia. The light of North Africa aroused
in him a sense of color, and there Klee made his now-famous statement:
"Color and I are one. I am a painter."

Twittering Machine

In January 1921, at the invitation of architect Walter Gropius, its founding director, Klee began teaching at the Bauhaus. When the school moved from Weimar to Dessau four years later, Klee and his wife shared a Gropius-designed faculty house with the Kandinskys.

Ventriloquist and Crier in the Moor, 1923

During the decade Klee spent at the Bauhaus, he created some of his most endearing art works, including The Twittering Machine, Dance You Monster to My Sweet Song, and Highroads and Byroads. It is to the school's credit that they supported his work, since the philosophy of the place was to try and fit everything into a square box. The more precise the musical and mathematical formulas he devised for his work, the more the work itself took off in bizarre and unpredictable directions.
Klee at the Bauhaus: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/klees-first-rule-bauhaus-you-dont-get-bauhaus

In the late 30's, as the world raced toward war and Klee had to seek refuge from the Nazis by fleeing to Switzerland, his work, always visionary, took on tragic overtones. He was dying of scleroderma, a devastating disease which turned his skin into a kind of armor.

Burdened Children, 1930

In the year and a half remaining to him--he died in June 1940 as Western Europe was being engulfed in war-- "he crowded in an amazingly copious and varied output, as if he were collecting all his baggage for the great voyage: more than 1,650 paintings, drawings and colored works all told. Many of them are full of premonitions, of his fate and the fate of the world." Robert Wernick

In
this work, he covered a sheet of newspaper with black gouache on which
he then drew the outlines of the figure and of the crescent moon with a
thick, soft graphite pencil. Then he filled in these forms with a thin
white wash. It is the black ground peeking through the white pigment
that gives this creature its ghostly shimmer.

In spite of his success during his lifetime, Klee was generally regarded as a peripheral artist. It was only after his death that he began to receive critical acclaim. A careful look shows how enormous his influence has been in every "school" of art. But he never founded a school; his vision was too unique.

"Klee's career was a search for the symbols and metaphors that would make this belief visible. More than any other painter outside the Surrealist movement (with which his work had many affinities - its interest in dreams, in primitive art, in myth, and cultural incongruity), he refused to draw hard distinctions between art and writing. Indeed, many of his paintings are a form of writing: they pullulate with signs, arrows, floating letters, misplaced directions, commas, and clefs; their code for any object, from the veins of a leaf to the grid pattern of Tunisian irrigation ditches, makes no attempt at sensuous description, but instead declares itself to be a purely mental image, a hieroglyph existing in emblematic space." -

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

The Northern California Women's Caucus for Art (NCWCA) is a networking organization for women in the arts. They offer exciting events and programs: member forums, exhibitions, art-making, art activism and community. Dues are $65 a year but the exposure to other women artists and the opportunity to network is priceless.

Monday, December 15, 2014

I have trudged up the hill to this concrete block of a building more times than I care to remember. Figuring out the Berkeley bus system has been a challenge, not helped by the usual surly bus driver or Berkeley's confusing bus schedules.

Some people like the space. I hate it - it's cold, difficult to mount shows in with gray walls that suck the life out of art and acoustics that allow the least whisper to boomerang around the hollow circle until your ears ring.

But the shows have been intriguing, interesting and even when a failure, more of a success than many a more "successful" but boring show in a mainstream museum or gallery.

I won't miss the old concrete barn and am looking forward to the party of all parties to end her tenure on the right note:

Happy birthday to Edvard Munch, an undisputed master of the print medium - as well as that more famous poster that most of us had on our walls at one time or another. Born on this day in 1863

Munch was born in Norway on December 12, 1863. He was the son of a
priest, and lter wrote “My father was temperamentally nervous and
obsessively religious—to the point of psychoneurosis. From him I
inherited the seeds of madness. The angels of fear, sorrow, and death
stood by my side since the day I was born.”

The Scream is Munch's most famous work and one of the most
recognizable paintings in all art. It has been widely interpreted as
representing the universal anxiety of modern man.
Painted with broad bands of garish color and highly simplified forms,
and employing a high viewpoint, the agonized figure is reduced to a
garbed skull in the throes of an emotional crisis.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Long before Madonna became the icon of pop culture. the original Madonna was the focus of worship for millions of Christians for over 2000 years. That would be the original Mary, the mother of Jesus.

“Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea,” a new exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) , takes a look at the representation of the Virgin Mary in Renaissance and Baroque Europe. This landmark exhibition brings together more than 60 Renaissance- and Baroque-era masterworks from the Vatican Museums, Uffizi Gallery, and other museums, churches, and private collections in Europe and the United States. Presenting the multi-faceted images of Mary is part of the NMWA's ongoing program of major historical loan exhibitions that examine humanist themes related to womankind.

Friday, December 5, 2014

Georges-Pierre Seurat (2 December 1859 – 29 March 1891) was a French Post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. His large work "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte "(1884–1886), his most famous painting, altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism, and is one of the icons of 19th century painting.

Seurat was looking for "something new, an art entirely my own." By
studying the science and aesthetics of perception, light, and color, he
attempted systematically to re-create nature's luminosity. In the
technique he preferred to call "divisionism," Seurat juxtaposed touches
of unmixed color for "optical" mixing by the viewer's retina.

Seated Bather, 1883

After a year of military service at Brest, Seurat exhibited his drawing
Aman-Jean
at the official Salon in 1883. Panels from his painting
Bathing at Asnieres
were refused by the Salon the next year, so Seurat and several
other artists founded the Societe des Artistes Independants.

His famous
canvas
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte
was the
centerpiece of an exhibition in 1886. By then Seurat was spending his winters
in Paris, drawing and producing one large painting each year, and his summers
on France's northern coast

The Models, 1887-1888

Peasant Woman Seated in the Grass, 1882-1883

The Eiffel Tower, 1889

In his short life Seurat produced seven
monumental paintings, 60 smaller ones, drawings, and sketchbooks. He kept his
private life very secret, and not until his sudden death in Paris on March
29, 1891, did his friends learn of his mistress, who was the model for his
painting
Young Woman Holding a Powder Puff.

This is a portrait of Madeline Knoblock, Seurat's mistress. Sge brings to mind the circus and carnival
people and the music-hall artistes Seurat was seeing so much of at the
time (he often went to the Gaite Rochechouart and the Eden
Concert). Perhaps Seurat wanted to show us his lovermin her
habitual surroundings- corseted like a traveling player, dressed in
organdy, with heavy bracelets and a pink hair-ribbon of the kind we
see attached to the round mirror on that little rickety- looking table.

Poplars. Conté crayon on Michallet paper

Seurat died in Paris in his parents home on March 21 1891. He was only 31. His last ambitious work, The Circus, was left unfinished at the time of his death.

"But Seurat was a complete artist at twenty-five when be painted the Grande Jatte. What is remarkable, beside the perfection of this enormously complex work, is the historical accomplishment. It resolved a crisis in painting and opened the way to new possibilities.
If one can isolate a single major influence on the art of the important younger painters in Paris in the later '80s, it is the work of Seurat; Van Gogh, Gauguin and Lautrec were all affected by it. - From Meyer Schapiro, "Modern Art"

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Following Black Friday and Cyber Monday is the new international day of giving dubbed #GivingTuesday. On Dec. 2, holiday shoppers around the world will focus on making gifts to support charities and non-profits.

Art suggestions include museum membership or a gift shop Item. Support your local museum or one near your gift recipient with a membership or gift shop purchase. Browse your favorite museum's website for gift ideas, such as a membership card or visit a local art gallery to buy that special gift for that special someone. Support your local artists and a small local gallery - more here: